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Upon consummation of the curator’s introduction The Author emerges from somewhere stage left—the wings, if you will—shakes the curator’s hand, kisses her cheek, etc., and approaches the podium. He starts things rolling with an obvious—in a very high-brow sort of way—joke that elicits a favorable response, then jumps quickly to a kind of general overview of what else but postmodernism and the nature of language, &c., putting himself at risk straight-off of seeming ridiculously antiquated, quotidian and boring, though this possibility is merely eclipsed by the progressively apparent verity that The Author has an audaciously minor understanding of the actual subject at hand. Sure, he touches on things like self-consciousness, though briefly and tangentially, focusing instead mostly on what he keeps referring to as this sort of universal ‘fleetingness in contemporary literature,’ vs., e.g., Prewar Russian Lit which has indeed, he claims, in any case sort of ‘stood the test of time,’ but not once does he mention, say, the proliferation of the digital/virtual vs. still photography/say, airline travel, or of globalization and the assimilation and consequent death of überminority culture i.e. The Exotic Other—in a literary sense, of course—nor does he even allude to Foucault. And this sort of unnoticed, profanely ill-advised or else simply un-/malinformed and linguistically ostentatious debacle just sort of progresses for nearly an hour, until he finally comes to an appropriately specious conclusion and pauses briefly before fielding questions from the audience. By the by, one antecedent occurrence of note: Sometime mid-treatise The Author pauses, apropos an apparent nothing, reaches into his pocket and peers down at an ostensible cellphone, then covers the mike and speaks to it, i.e. the cellphone, briefly, returns it to his pocket and remarks, now again into the microphone, “My wife,” whereupon the audience emits a polite, genuine laughter, it dies and The Author continues. The first of the audience’s questions concerns not-surprisingly who The Author’s influences are? His answer: Hackneyed staples—modernist staples, mind you—Joyce et al., no Barth, no, say, Wallace, Coover, no Barthelme, Pynchon, no DeLillo. Next comes the obligatory request for some description, if concise or approximate, of The Author’s Writing Process. Gladly, The Author obliges—expounds upon his writing room, how personal it is, how particular to his specific authorial idiosyncrasies, his what-have-you, he mentions his beloved typewriter—sort of non-incidentally remarks that he never uses a computer, whereupon the audience nearly explodes in applause, as if to deify him just for sticking it out with this older technology, as if computers are evil, as if this senescent, sort of stodgy and conservative group (although ostensibly pretty liberal politically, or at least fancying themselves as such, since they, you know, read books—and are avid and enthusiastic supporters of the arts, apparently: During the aforementioned lecture, before the cellphone incident, as a tangent to (read: way-out of) some sad, magniloquent post-structuralism bit, The Author elucidates his affinity to, say, a more literally visual artist e.g. a painter in that where the former creates pictures on a literal canvas, the latter (i.e. The Author) does the same only on a more cerebral, less material canvas, i.e. a reader’s mind, which is bothersome for two reasons, the first being his use of the whole former/latter construction which, while admittedly appropriate given the context of the whole situation, is nonetheless, like, alarmingly pretentious-sounding when spoken aloud and the second being the obvious fact that the entire metaphor is anyway painfully clichéd) is categorically opposed to technology and the natural progression of scientific development vis-à-vis e.g. the microchip industry and such, and that, basically, computers are shit and older is better. What’s interesting to think about, though the continuing applause illustrates that no one does, is this: What if this same thing is happening say 130 years ago, maybe ten or so years after the typewriter has been invented and is quickly becoming a common tool of most contemporary authors (Dostoevsky, Dickens, James, Alcott, etc.), and some antediluvian precursor of theirs stands at some podium and claims to never use such a machine (putting loathsome emphasis on the word, even), but instead writes everything with a pen and ink, as the place erupts in puritan cheer—what about that? Not to mention, of course, that cellphone call from earlier? In any case, however, The Author says, “No no, please,” as if to assert some requisite pretense of modesty, as if one’s mere use of a typewriter, surely, is no cause for his being exalted thusly. “Please, let me finish,” says The Author. He then goes on to say that once seated at his desk, upon which sits little more than the aforementioned typewriter, maybe a mug of coffee now and then, once he’s comfortable in his chair and all and has started thinking about what it is he’s actually going to write, his thoughts turn, inevitably and invariably, and but interestingly enough, to get this to things like rape and like child abuse, to lynchings, to beatings, to skinning animals alive, to vivisection, to, yes, to bestiality, always and especially to bestiality, to various stripes of sodomy apart from the agreed-upon sort, to twelve-year-olds in gutters, to this and that sort of thing, and to others, and others, and others. ‘Inevitably,’ he says, quite serious and with marvelous insouciance, and he continues, about the young girls and the animals, says that, placing his hands on the keys, he starts to type and usually has about half a page in front of him before his thoughts finally turn to things more literary and sooner or later, he says, he has enough pages for a book—which is supposed to be a sort of joke, like: Oh well that’s all it takes, you know, just bang out a bunch of sentences, like just get enough down there on the page, and sooner or later you’ll have yourself an entire novel. Like a sort of non self–deprecating joke whose sardonic implication is that it takes a hell of a lot more work than that to write a book, though the joke comes off instead as slightly arrogant and, once again, a bit turgid, and no one in the audience really laughs, though not because they think it turgid or arrogant, but merely, probably, because they just don’t really get it.
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On Paul Auster